Pain is an invitation to heal so our wounds can become our wisdom.

Ashley Karen Roy

Personal

I live in Oregon with the loves of my life, Lana Banana (a Puerto Rican street dog), Percy Pants (an Australian Cattle Dog-Corgi mix), and Florence Freedom (a Bengal kitten leash-trained to accompany us through the wilds of the Pacific Northwest). We are building a house and, in the next few years, a treatment center on the cusp of the California border. I say “we” because the pets have contributed to site work by way of digging, their needs have informed the architecture, and loving them sustains me through the project’s difficulties.

Our house is designed as a temple to living well, and to the work that is my life’s devotion, but the land is our Home.

Her terrain is rugged. Juniper, sagebrush, and wildflower predominate between rocks flung and fallen from a distant volcanic eruption. Her ecosystem, a deer and eagle migration pathway, is vital. Home to birds, insects, lizards, jackrabbits, and myriad charming rodents, she is also attended by cougar and bear. Birds of prey pick off the uncareful snake.

Her views are astonishing. Mount Shasta rises to the South as the Klamath River Basin sprawls to the North. The Union Pacific rail cuts through a patchwork of farmlands wherefrom horses, livestock, and poultry punctuate a hushed soundscape with their calls. When the sun sets or has yet to rise, city lights dazzle along the horizon as stars fill the sky to abundance or fade into a dewy dawn.

And her air! How perfect it is in stillness and breezes—perfumed by life, vibrating with biology, carrying nature’s music—even as her dirt roads plume with travel.

Professional

I am a QMHP and Clinical Social Work Associate (CSWA) pursuing licensure while seeing clients through two practices. At Willamette Wellness Center, my areas of focus include complex trauma, suicidality, and couple’s work. At Place2Heal, I work with struggling children, teens, and families.

My background includes 15 years of combined experience in psychology (including direct care and clinical research), education (including teaching and curriculum design), and intellectual activism (including campus leadership and nonprofit program development).

I graduated from Boise State with a Masters of Social Work (MSW) and from UW-Madison with an honors B.A. in psychology. I highly recommended both programs.

Spiritual Influences

“Elegance… is no superficial matter, but rather the way that man found to honour the way he places his two feet upon the ground.” – Paulo Coelho

I am unfamiliar with the author of this quote but I invoke his words here because there is something in the way the following men and women place their two feet upon the ground, something in the way they walk their work, that resonates with me and guides the spiritual tenor of my helping relationships.

I have omitted psychologists and philosophers whose intellectual influence I will acknowledge elsewhere. This quartet is comprised of educators who took for their subject the souls of their pupils—not as the evangelist does when trying to bring them under heel, but as the liberator does when gesturing, “Here is how to know the world for yourself, here is how to become yourself, here is how to relate yourself to the world so that it may know you and become your home.”

The lot of them were sensitive observers with keen minds who concerned themselves with the inner lives of striving beings, the outward manifestations of successful striving, and the conditions that support it. They were crusaders of the spirit against such forces as would dampen its light and beacons of light who vanquished such ignorance as keeps people in shadows. Most especially, they were excavators of human potential who delivered the material of self-creation into hands they trained for that purpose.

Although some of their pupils achieved greatness, the aim of their guidance was goodness; raising boys and girls into men and women who would lead virtuous lives rich with meaning, in communities made vital by their participation. For all the grandeur of this work, for all its drama—helping people become is no small feat—its context was domestic and its results served to elevate the activities and experiences of daily living.

My ambition is not to do justice to these educators so much as to inspire your interest. I will introduce you to one of them at a time until they are all in attendance. Commissioned portraits are by the lovely and talented Sarah Monaghan.

Anne Sullivan

Teacher of Helen Keller. Anne is my heroine for refusing to surrender Helen to a life devoid of meaning and connection. This despite the fact that her pupil was not only blind, deaf, and mute but estranged from the notion of language, thus unable to form or communicate thoughts. This after having been orphaned, institutionalized, and abused for being partially blind and deaf herself. This, which demanded she leave behind her beloved brother to pursue an unprecedented “special education;” a chance at freedom, the lessons of which would inform her teaching of Helen. Where others despaired of Helen’s flailing, wordless tantrums, Anne viewed them as hopeful evidence of a vital energy seeking its conduit. Where Helen’s family did not believe she could be raised as a child and tolerated brutishness out of pity, Anne waged a holy war to bring her behavior under civilizing influence so she could relate—love and be loved—as a person rather than a poorly trained pet. And where others resigned themselves to a fate in which Helen would not rise to the conceptual level or know a life of purpose, Anne perceived a dormant intelligence she was hellbent on awakening. With a singular combination of insight and inspiration, intuition and relentlessly thoughtful trial and error, Anne unlocked Helen’s mind and in so doing opened the whole of the world to her understanding and achievement.

Watch the original motion picture. Read the play it adapts. Read Helen’s memoir.

Fred Rogers

Creator and host of the children’s television show, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. At a time when media inundated children with spectacle and farce, Fred advocated for programming that normalized childhood experiences while honoring their drama. Segments of his show fostered children’s sense of agency by teaching them how to identify and regulate their emotions; give form to the thoughts underlying them; and choose the words and actions with which to express them. He made room for overwhelming feelings such as anger and shame; helped children process the ambivalence of growing pains when approaching developmental milestones such as going to school; assuaged innocent concerns such as fears of going down the drain with the bathwater; and broached difficult or taboo subjects such as divorce and developing bodies. In other segments, he helped children understand the world by distinguishing fantasy from reality, addressing timeless and timely issues such as race relations and assassination in a comprehensible manner, and pulling back the curtain on such taken-for-granted things as how traffic lights work and mail gets delivered. Children who might have felt alienated or impinged upon by the adult world found that with Mr. Rogers’ guidance, confusion and curiosity lead to intelligibility and wonder. Fred offered children the exemplar of a dignified adult worthy of their emulation but accepting of their nascent, developing selves.

Watch episodes of the show. Watch Fred testify in Washington on behalf of his kind of children’s programming. Watch the documentary, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?. Watch the motion picture starring Tom Hanks, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.

Psychologashley

Purpose

Life is about identifying and forming, pursuing and achieving, enjoying and benefitting from values. The spiritual reward of this process is on display here, in the pleasurable experience of efficacy. Our souls smile at the sight of this young woman because she is alive; what she has done is live.

How? By cultivating the virtues required by her chosen values and the capacities to enact causes of her desired effects. By bridging the chasm and walking the path from where she was to where she saw herself being. Henceforth she can skateboard such paths.

To live we must grow.

In putting will to action, she no doubt incurred bruises, perhaps even wounds, to limb and ego.

To grow we must heal.

If you take forming yourself as seriously as this young woman takes performing her kickflip, if you strive to become capable and worthy of a life punctuated by sacred moments like hers (though they will be more solemn at times) then my purpose is to help you heal and grow and live.

I see our work as centering upon a bold new vision of psychological wellbeing and accompanying perspectives on the processes that yield it. As I develop my views into essays and programs, I hope to help equip, train, and guide your approach.

You can set out from anywhere. Whether you are generally healthy and happy but seeking higher ground as a matter of course or preparing to undertake the following bodies of work in a state of dysfunction and distress, welcome.

Healing the legacies of developmental trauma

Our work as children is to discover and navigate the world anew; to know and bring ourselves into being; and, paraphrasing artist Kelsy Landin who paraphrased Erich Fromm, to relate ourselves to the world by means of our human powers. It matters whether we set about our development beholden to caregivers who honor and facilitate this work, who are attuned to our needs and capacities, or who are ignorant, incompetent, indifferent—even hostile. In an environment that is fertile for growth and abundant with the material of self-creation, or one that is barren, parched, toxic. In a world that is stable, intelligible, and accessible to us, or one that is chaotic, confusing, closed off. It matters whether we are understood and helped to understand, valued and helped to value—or not.

But how does it matter? How does our past influence our present, and how can we exercise agency accordingly? I help people answer this question by bringing more of their experience into conscious awareness thus into the realm of volition. Where indicated, I facilitate mourning or making peace with the past; healing wounds that, untended to, bleed into and poison the present; and remediating vital aspects of development by reclaiming resources stolen for self-preservation and directing them back toward learning to live.

Healing the legacies of romantic trauma

There are many paths to a broken heart and it is not my goal to help people avoid them; that would require a defensive stance and fear is the undertaker of love. If there is something to avoid in love, it is not a broken heart but wasted time. Not everyone shows up to their relationships in a spirit of partnership. Not everyone knows how to be a partner or sees fit to learn. Some people do incredible damage through thoughtlessness and carelessness. Others harbor resentment and malice whose causes are concealed but whose effects are devastating. Some are strangers to themselves thus inevitably estranged from those who try to know them. Others betray themselves and unleash their unresolved inner conflicts in a chaos of back-and-forths, tearing apart those who try to love them.

My goal is to help people become, attract, and develop healthy relationships with partners on whom a good heart is never wasted—whether or not they ultimately spend their lives together—and emerge from the wreckage of toxic relationships clarified, pure of spirit, readier for love.

Rescuing the will to live

I have helped people heal who were previously unable to do anything with their pain but turn it against themselves, others, or the world writ large. Many of them—their suffering having withstood countless clinicians, therapies, medications, and hospitalizations—were diagnosed with “treatment resistant” or “intractable” mental illness. But I have seen that a young man who went mute for years, overdosed, ran into traffic, dangled from a noose, and starved himself to the point of organ failure—someone whose family had resigned themselves to planning his funeral—can make the journey from self-destruction to self-creation; from the seeming renunciation of life itself to choosing, fighting for, and living a life that is his.

To paraphrase Anne Sullivan in The Miracle Worker, giving up is my idea of original sin. But trying doesn’t look for me like it does for most.

Projects